Before Dust: Exhibition Review

This show is defined by the diversity of the practices represented, but can be seen as dealing primarily with questions of grotesquery, liberation/constraint, and artistic production itself. At a glance this emphasis is apparent, be it through the unveiling of the excesses of western consumption in the work of Zhong Hao Chen in its own excessive luxuriance and scatology, or the very real treatment of the visceral in its most literal sense in Shannon Williamson’s “specimens” and “case studies”. Here sexuality and its relationship to questions of power is also examined, as in the work of Oscar Enberg, working through the ruins of the western tradition, reanimating the corpses of Shakespeare and the performance theorists Stanislavski and Laban through a deformative action of rebirth.

Gaby Montejo’s work demonstrates Adorno’s conception of art’s inherent (conventional) non-functionality as basis for political statement. The conventional means of engagement with flour and the photo-reactive are subverted in favour of the unintentional and spontaneous. The capturing of the real temporal ephemerality of the flame’s image reopens questions of power and control, moving beyond the drive toward closure in favour of ongoing discussion. Experiment as performance here joins with the disavowal or problematization of the ego through unintentionality pioneered by Fluxus practitioners such as John Cage and Jackson Mac Low.

Zhong Hao Chen's work is characterised by excess and overflow. Grotesque luxuriance permeates his treatment of the canvasses, implicating the viewer in an economy of gluttony. The earthy, brutal palette contributes to this treatment of unease, as staple foodstuffs are destroyed in a rage of gestural, antagonistic brushstrokes, and conflated with scatological textures and tones in an unnerving conflation of sustenance and excrement.

Shannon Williamson’s work operates as an unveiling, a tearing open of the skin to unveil the libidinal impulses lurking below the surface, those of muscle, tissue and organ. The folds of flesh operate as points of contact and problematized sites of difference, where the differentiation between bodies and their constitutive parts are complicated by contact and penetration, rupture and permutation, and the conventional notion of body as site for autonomous subjectivity is erased.

Oscar Enberg’s practice involves a proto-modernist network of complex over-coding and associations, resulting in dense, hermetic works that resist entry. These drawings pertain to a mechanical or (a-) functional allegory of sexuality, production and conceptual relationships through the construction and deconstruction of thought experiments. Enberg weaves a trail of wreckage, using the iambic foot as a chassis for his war machine, exploiting and pillaging the resources of history. This is a performance of irresponsibility as social work, a deconstruction and subversion of the discourses of history, visual art and theatre, leaving a trail of destruction through the narratives of western artistic canons.

--Ross Brighton

Update on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 8:34AM by Gilt

This review was written by Ross Brighton, Christchurch based poet, critic, writer and author.

Ross's new book 'A PELT,A SHRUB, A SOIL SAMPLE' is being launched this Friday, 12th June at 6:30pm, at Goodbye Blue Monday, in Poplar lane christchurch.

For details on how to purchase a copy of 'A PELT, A SHRUB, A SOIL SAMPLE' please contact Ross via his blogspot http://ignoretheventriloquists.blogspot.com/. We will be updating this post shortly with details of the distributors of 'A PELT,A SHRUB, A SOIL SAMPLE'

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